Bartleby’s Book of Buttons may be the best educational iPad book available. I don’t say this lightly. There are a lot of books on the iPad that my kids absolutely love. Certainly the Toy Story iPad games would come to my kids’ minds. But that is because the kids have an affection for Toy Story. […]

Analogies for Kids is an educational iPad app that has a premise I love. It is a quiz that lets kids practice both verbal and geometrical analogies. It is extremely low tech but the questions are just great and I think they really help cultivate young minds. My dream is that one day there are […]

Here’s a statistic that is hard to believe: 93% of eight graders cannot correctly identify the three branches of government. But these are the stats provided by the 2010 National Assessment of Education Program test. The apples do not far from the tree. Adults struggle too. Surveys show that fewer than half of U.S. adults […]

Nearly 300 Kindergarten students in Alburn, Maine are getting Apple iPad 2s this fall. School superintendent Tom Morrill calls the iPad what I have called it: a revolution in education. This is just a plain good thing for these kids. But the Washington Post always feels compelled tomanufacture a debate in an effort to be […]

Carol Dweck’s “Mindset”

If you read the popular books on success, almost all of the authors refer back to Carol Dweck’s work. She is clearly a titan researcher so when I found out she had written her own book, “Mindset“, I was giddy. Why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth?

Her premise is that intelligence is not fixed but eminently teachable. If you don’t believe this, if you have the wrong “mindset”, it creates a self fulfilling prophecy and, worse, it makes you stop challenging yourself because you don’t think effort helps. Moreover, a limiting mindset causes lack of fulfillment, depression and a host of other aliments. It all makes a ton of sense.

Unfortunately, for buyers of the book, I’ve told you virtually everything you need to know. She never really takes the book anywhere else beyond repeat the premise 1,000 different ways. Worse still, Dweck weaves in a bunch of silly anecdotes and contrived narratives:

John McEnroe was basically a failure. He was one of the best tennis players in the history of the world and is the best commentator in tennis (at least arguably). This we know. Yet someone her narrative is paints him as a failure. I’m left with the question, if mindset is so important and his was so awful, how did he become great? That question gets lost in the “he saw awful” leitmotif.

Michael Jordan’s success was in part due to his great humility. Michael Jordan? Seriously? Have you read anything about Michael Jordan or did your research include watching 1,000 Nike commercials

She tells this story about how she caught this big fly fish after a fishing lesson and two men her were there assumed her much too evolved husband would feel ashamed to have been beaten by a woman because they too felt ashamed. About catching a fish? The chances this was not just her interpretation at a joke? Close to zero. The whole thing just seemed out of touch.

And this is all just in the first few chapters. For such a serious researcher, Dweck frequently refers to studies but never actually provides any citation.

I feel bad beating down such an obviously brilliant researcher. But I went in with the presumption that this was going to be a good book and left it feeling like I had wasted my money. But that does not detract from Dweck’s important message about mindset. I would just rather read Gladwell interpreting Dweck then reading Dweck herself.